Comparative Criticism

Shelf Life

By: W.S.C Johnson

Two loose leafs of collected Plath
and ‘un-sent letters home’
are propped up by two tombs
of dust jacketed Hughes
accompanied by ‘aussie’ verse by Frieda.

Only the ‘old-master’ Heaney has spaces reserved,
Pollard, Holland and Padel exchange expletives,
just the brave Sophie and Hannah find time to write rhyme.

Three by Thomas of the valley lie flat on their backs,

undervalued and incomplete, buried before his time.

Duffy and companion front-up together.

Prof Motion and Sir Milligan, misplaced, rub alphabetic shoulders.

Zephaniah and McGough, are falling apart, having split their sides.

Fabre & Fabre elite classics are Bloodaxed, by the upstarts,

both fight off laughable laminates and glossy ‘self-pampered booklets’

by the overlooked, hard done by ‘vanity un-fair’.

Brave and upright, a spine of steel, yester-years young Owen

proudly stands ‘head and shoulders’ above the warring rest.

Pammie Ayres and Wendy try to Cope and take each other seriously,

Glossy and embossed, Paul McCartney is slotted in,

‘new kid on the block’, poetry or rock, lively or lyrical?.

Tennyson, Wordsworth and Byron solely occupy the elite upper shelf,

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are all ‘booked out’,

his plays and other ditty’s are filed under literature

ANALYSIS

I need to remind you that these exercises are meant to comple­ment, not replace, the usual analysis we carry out in our literature courses. As far as I'm concerned,  reading/appreciating  texts is still the primary occupation one expects of a literature class. The idea behind incorporating creative writing techniques and strategies in such a class rests on the assumption, let me repeat, that writing or "creating" is already, in itself, the clearest and highest expression of literary appreciation. In other words:  a good writer is necessarily already a good reader. Likewise, encouraging students to write imaginatively inevitably leads to their having a stronger grasp of ideas, which should prove helpful to them in their literary analyses, as well. In fact, I believe that as long as a student cannot use words to describe ordinary objects, she cannot be expected to use words to argue by or communicate complex ideas with.

The second activity I thought of telling you about today builds on the strengths that should've ideally been effectuated by these different exercises in description. It involves, this time around, the telling of a story—in particular, a story about a secret. It remains a poet's exercise, however, and in this case, the poet who suggested it to me is the Hawaiian American Garrett Hongo. I call it, simply, "Secrets," and what it does is to drive home the point that poetic writing involves imagining as vividly, as concretely, as meaningfully, as possible—a task admittedly difficult for beginning writers, who can only write about themselves, about experiences they themselves go through.

The activity goes this way: you ask your students to put down in writing, in a single, complete sentence on a small piece of paper they shouldn't write their names on, a secret about themselves. Because of the potentially scandalous nature of this exercise, I like to insert a proviso into this uneasy bit of instruction: the secret they write may not be completely accurate, even as it should, in essence, be "true." At this point the class becomes evidently excited.

Certainly, I've not always been able to prove myself equal to this challenge. There have been dark and dreary days. There have been days of abject frustration and despair. But what I will share with you this morning is not the bitter sap of any of those days—but, rather, the sweet nectar of the good days, the days when success seemed easy enough to achieve. Over the years I have been able to evolve a personal "style," one might say, of teaching poetry, and to a great extent it involves getting the students to write—not just reactions or themes, but still other examples of creative or imaginative writing.